Olura (9 page)

The barrow became heavier and I realised that I was pushing it up a slight slope which ought not to be there. A moment afterwards it wasn’t there; it had dropped, turf, surface and all, a
couple of feet. I had gone charging past the rubbish tip and into the split levels of the landslide. The little platform on which I was standing felt like a jelly balanced on a point. I leapt
instinctively to safety and then actually returned to retrieve Livetti and the barrow—an act which illustrates my underlying terror of losing control of his destiny.

The subsidence was silent except for the sudden crash of stones on the hard bottom of the ravine and Olura’s not too stifled cry of alarm. Both were heard in the new workings. Two men
jumped the fence, one of them carrying a lantern. Another, after exchanging shouts with them, picked up an emergency telephone on the wall of the power plant.

Olura and I lay flat. I had just time to turn the wheelbarrow upside down on top of Livetti. But the two men scrambled down the rubbish tip into the ravine without looking to right or left. They
must have thought that the woman’s voice had given a loud scream at the bottom of the cut rather than a muffled one at the top.

We were on our feet at once and trotting back behind the barrow on the now familiar path. But that telephone call had worked. Three lanterns appeared from the gatehouse, cutting us off from the
woods and the car. The men stopped at the edge of the slope of ore and yelled to their two companions who were stumbling about the bottom of the cut.

Olura asked me why they were so excited. I whispered back that there had recently been a crime in the old workings. Some woman had been murdered, and they were on the alert lest it should happen
again.
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‘Can those three get down to the bottom from there?’ she asked.

I replied that they could, and that it was the route which I had first taken.

She vanished before I could say a word. I couldn’t call out after her, nor imagine what she was up to. I just waited in desperation, terrified lest she might miss the path and fall over
the edge. At last from the direction of the rubbish tip and well inside the ravine I heard two piercing screams. They sounded to me too clear, musical and Kensingtonian for any local girl in
trouble; but the effect was immediate. The three men crashed down the ore pile to the rescue.

She rejoined me minutes later. By that time all the lights in the ravine were bobbing towards the shaft and its pool. We ran along the now unguarded path, still with the barrow, and reached the
woods.

‘Brilliant! But what a gamble!’ I exclaimed. ‘It didn’t sound as if it really came from the bottom.’

‘I don’t suppose it did,’ she said. ‘But once men have got something firmly fixed in their heads they don’t think.’

We sat down to get our breath back. There could be no argument over the next move. She must get the car away at once. I was sure that those sturdy quarrymen would have put through a call to
Civil Guard or police. As for the incubus in the barrow, it was a dishevelled, muddy nightmare to be got rid of. It could not conceivably be returned to the boot. The events of the last twenty
minutes had accustomed us both to forget that it had had any previous existence.

The sea must take it. The pylons of the cableway, glimpsed now and then in the clear gaps of the racing sky, had already suggested a solution which I regretted that I had not tried in the first
place, though perhaps beyond my strength single-handed. Olura could only accept, for she had to get the car away. Her weary face under the dark, dripping hood had lost all its air of slightly
mocking pride. There was only a helpless misery in her eyes as if she would never see me again and it was all her fault.

I hurried her off, telling her to drive around for half an hour and then to park inconspicuously in the nearby village of Pobeña, on the road between the houses and the little seashore
hotel. This catered for the transient tourist, and the place was full of foreign cars. In the unlikely event of being questioned, she could always answer that she had been unable to find a room and
was sleeping in her car till dawn.

Between the quarries and the bay was a formidable headland. The line of the cableway crossed it by a saddle and then dropped straight to the cliff. I found a stony, steep farm-track leading in
the right direction, and pushed and pulled the barrow up. The blasted thing seemed to weigh more than Livetti. By the time I had reached a crossing of lanes halfway to the top I was utterly
exhausted. Leaving the wheelbarrow in the care of a sleeping cow, I explored with increasing hopelessness until at last I found a pylon. After that it was fairly plain pushing, for a path ran
downhill beneath the cableway.

A mile away to my right was the beach of Pobeña and a few scattered lights in the village where that adorable, impossible woman would by now be sitting in the car. Below me was the attack
of the sea, little plumes of white on top of the breakers signalling for the main assault on the beaches while the flankers spouted and thundered as they swept along parallel to the cliff.

Myself and the puppet still more or less intact, we skidded and rolled down the last heather-covered slope to the ore dump. The arm of the chute slanted downwards and outwards from the top of
the cliff like the boom of a great crane. At the end was an oblong cradle some fifty feet above the sea. Livetti and I descended the chute faster than I intended. There was a revolving belt on it
worked by gravity, and we weighed enough to move and accelerate the well-oiled rollers. As we approached the cradle I hoped to God that the bottom flaps were shut when not in use. I remembered that
I had seen quarrymen sitting in it and fishing with long lines on a Sunday afternoon.

Gravity and grease delivered us into the cradle. The flaps were shut, or I should not be writing. But my nerves and patience were at an end. I was standing in a space the size of a small truck
with no more visible connection to earth than an aeroplane, while that inchoate menace below hurled up curtains of spray between the cradle and the cliff. Trembling with panic and inefficiency, I
filled Livetti’s pockets with lumps of iron ore and stuffed some more inside his shirt. Most of it fell out as I threw him overboard.

I need not have descended so quickly. On one side of the chute was a narrow, slatted band up which I could walk so long as I did not look down. Once safely on solid masonry again, I recovered
some power to think and decided not to leave an inexplicable wheelbarrow about. So I let the chute carry us both to the cradle, and tipped it into the sea as well.

It was quick and easy to rejoin Olura, for a broad cliff path ran back to Pobeña from the top of the chute. As I walked back I began to feel frozen with cold. I was plastered with
squelching mud from head to foot, covered with bruises from the barrow and with both hands raw from the rusty handles.

When I left Olura in the darkness I had not realised that she too was in the same condition. Apart from the cloak, she had not been dressed for violent activity. After that anonymous telephone
call to Mgwana she had, to avoid any suspicion, changed into a light woollen frock of the type which fashion writers—if faced with the problem—might well have described as suitable for
dining with a black Prime Minister, a secret policeman and a dilapidated don. The skirt of this enigmatic frock was now held together by a safety pin and mud. Her legs were bleeding in several
places, and there was a nasty cut on one arm. Her impulsive and successful charge halfway down the rubbish tip and back had knocked her about badly. The cloak, now a spongy mass thrown on the floor
of the car, had at any rate kept her dry.

We drove back the way we had come; not that I had any fear that the black Seat would still be cruising in search of us, but it seemed wise to avoid the centre of Bilbao and the bridges. We could
not afford to be seen entering the hotel as we were, so we waited till dawn, the heater of the car making my dampness tolerable, and then drove to the spring of Iturrioz, where the water shoots out
of a cleft in the limestone into cascading pools, with tall, white heather springing from the pockets of mossy soil.

Olura was an efficient traveller, well equipped with rags and sponges. I washed out the boot, removing all traces of its vile cargo, and then reduced the mud in the inside of the car to an
amount which might reasonably have been deposited by any rainy journey. Meanwhile Olura was at the spring, carrying out running repairs to herself.

You have asked me for absolute frankness, which I have given you. I refuse, however, to put unnecessary details, which in no way illustrate the difficulties of our plight, on exhibition.
Olura’s account which, you said, is in your possession—God forbid that I should ever see it!—will, if I know her, nakedly describe her first serious love affair. I will not
comment upon my choice of those two adjectives.

Certain personal details may, however, help you to assess my motives and the reliability of my story. As a man of the world—if I may be allowed that vulgar but expressive phrase—you
will rightly maintain that forty-eight hours, however agitated, do not offer sufficient evidence for a man, inoculated by pleasant and varied memories of fornication, to fall very gravely in love.
Until I saw Olura returning from the spring I did not for a moment admit to myself that I had done so. I considered my reactions to her presence to be, on the whole, a compound of lechery
restrained by tact. I was attracted by her, exasperated by her, shy both of her enthusiasms and her social position.

Shall we perhaps consider the picture postcard element? The sight of Olura emerging from the branches of white heather in the first of the sun would, I grant you, hardly guarantee the permanency
of my affection. But it might very well trigger off self-knowledge. There had indeed been a moment when I returned to the car at Pobeña at which our eyes had met with intention, but the
alarm of each at the appearance of the other was inhibiting and I rather think that both shrank from any sort of physical contact while the ghost of Livetti still dwelt in the boot. But now our
longing for each other was no longer complicated by pity and fear. I will leave it at that.

We returned to the Hostal de las Olas soon after nine, and tried to preserve our respectability by entering separately. Olura, carrying the beloved cloak rolled up under her arm, made a swift
dash for the stairs instead of the lift and at least confirmed her reputation for shyness. I myself, observing that the terrace was empty of waiters and breakfasters—for the sun which had
consecrated us had again vanished—sneaked through the open windows to the lift and was fairly caught by Mary Deighton-Flagg. She looked, sounded and smelt the worse for liquor.

‘My God!’ she exclaimed loudly. ‘Have you been in the sea?’

‘I have,’ I answered. ‘The tide was right for shrimping.’

‘Did Olura enjoy it?’

She disappeared into the dining-room, wiping her dagger and flaunting that doubly tight little bottom. She must have made it her business to keep tab on our movements. Once she had seen Mgwana
and Gonzalez come home without us she was perfectly capable of staying awake—with nips of brandy and a revolting pile of pink cigarette butts—to see when and in what condition we
returned.

Mgwana was in his room, fuming with anger and anxiety. He certainly worshipped Olura. Had danger threatened her in his own benevolent republic, I think the conference with his police would have
made one of Hitler’s sound like a wedding breakfast. He swung to the other extreme of confidence and gratitude as soon as he heard my story. It must be exasperating to a man of action when
one is debarred from any action whatever.

However, in one respect he came up with the fruits of his experience.

‘Don’t bandage those hands of yours,’ he said, ‘if you can bear it. Just keep them closed so that nobody notices and asks questions. And both of you must give me your
shoes, which I shall keep locked up with my papers.’

At the end of the day, after we had all got some sleep and fed at leisure and started to feel that we were no longer outlaws from civilisation, he decided to fly back to London and home to
Africa. He had no fear and he was well accustomed to relaxing even when guarded, but he was out of his depth as a tourist in Spain. He could never believe—he told me so—that the
painstaking Lieutenant Gonzalez was as efficient a companion as a detective-constable from Special Branch. That amused me, and confirmed my opinion that the truth bond of the Commonwealth is a kind
of Bournemouth/Torquay complex which is ill at ease without the comparative honesty of British-trained police and hot colonial puddings for dessert.

He was still disturbed at the lack of any obvious motive for the murder of Livetti. He repeated that nobody would take such a risk simply for a fifty-fifty chance of creating a front-page,
international scandal. Myself, I considered the actual happenings of that night unguessable. As good a theory as another was that Livetti had tried to blackmail his accomplice. But I admitted that
the more one tried to reconstruct such a quarrel, the less sense it made.

Olura and I had returned to the only relationship which Mgwana had seen between us—due, no doubt, to slight embarrassment on her part, and on mine to the sudden insecurity of the male
animal in love. When his intentions are strictly dishonourable, he has a pretty clear picture of them; but when his emotions are deeply involved, he can find a hundred reasons for refusing to
accept the evidence of his ears and eyes.

Mgwana wanted her to fly back with him, but she pointed out that she could not leave the car in Spain; she would drop him at the airport and then drive slowly home through France. The decision
was sensible and I could not oppose it. Anyway I had no chance. We were never alone except for disturbed moments while the chambermaids were moving my things to her room and hers to mine—an
exchange which I ordered without consulting her, knowing that she would protest that I couldn’t endure the room any more than she could.